What's Good For The African Diaspora Is Good For The World

April 20, 2011

Naomi Davis is an urban theorist, attorney, and activist. In this lecture, Davis weaves together the rate at which Americans are consuming earth's resources, the resulting disproportionate negative impact on communities of color, the obfuscation of energy efficiency vs. energy conservation, and the way our lifestyles must change if we are to "surthrive." Using the whole-system solution she authored for the whole-system problem common to black communities everywhere, Davis explores "green-village-building" as a culture-specific prescription with universal value and decouples the cure for blight from the homogeneity of gentrification. She thus both bundles and unpacks the principles of Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson who declared, "the economy is the wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment," and Dr. Martin Luther King who warned, "we either all go up together or all go down together."